Advance

Trait Thompson

Christianity: A Kinetic Faith

There’s a scene in the 1992 film Sister Act that kept coming to my mind as Pastor A.C. preached his sermon on the Advance theme on Sunday. After her first outing as the choir director in which she significantly jazzed up the typical musical selection, Sister Mary Clarence (Whoopi Goldberg) was called into Mother Superior’s office for a tongue lashing. Mother Superior called the new musical style blasphemous whereas Mary Clarence pointed out the people who had walked in off the streets to hear the choir perform. Later in the movie, buoyed by earlier success, she implored Mother Superior that the nuns needed to leave the friendly confines of the church walls and reach out to the city that began at the foot of the steps.

During his sermon, Pastor A.C. told all of us that the Great Commission did not call Christians to passivity. In fact, he said that God has called all of us to “go and go now!” In the movie, the nuns had grown stagnant in their walk and it took an outsider to reveal it to them. They believed they were walking in the will of God because of their ritual: daily prayer, fasting, meditation, vows of poverty, etc. And, while all of those things are cornerstones of the Christian faith, performed as an end unto themselves, they are hollow. The practices of Christianity should lead us directly into the action of Christianity.

When boiled down to its base level, Christianity is a kinetic faith. Matthew 5:15 explains this perfectly.

What good does it do anyone to turn on a lamp and then hide it under a basket?

We’ve been given the Light for a reason! Prayers and piety without the daily action of showing others the love of Christ is squandering the precious light we’ve received. Other religions are content with ritual, but we’ve been given a higher calling because our ritual is formed out of relationship. Our relationship with Jesus means we are not content just to sit in his presence. We have to share it any way we can or soon enough, all we will have left is cold procedure, absent of meaning.

During this time of focusing on how we might be better stewards of the gifts that God gave us, take some time to pray about your walk with Christ. Is your faith a dynamic faith or has it gone stale? Are you heeding the call of the Great Commission that implores us to go out into the world to share the Good News? If so, pray that God would sustain you in the mission that He’s given you. If not, pray He would reinvigorate you to walk anew into the ministry that He has placed on your life.